An enhanced V-Blast MIMO system using joint source and channel coding

An enhanced Vertical Bell Laboratories layered space-time (V-BLAST)-MIMO system complemented with joint source and channel coding scheme is proposed. The coding scheme is rate compatible punctured convolutional code (RCPC Code) with unequal error protection (UEP) to provide variable gain diversity with single encoder-decoder structure. The proposed system showed an ability to provide better error protection levels to data streams as the code rates decrease, and vice-versa. It is also shown that as the number of antennas increase, the overall system performance is further improved while the range of SNR covered is narrower, suggesting further bandwidth preservation.